October 11

I woke up in a ghostly panic. You know, the way ghosts sometimes appear to be panicking, such was my panic. The ghost sheets were cold, the sheets would be cold if they were somehow also a ghost. From within my ghost room, I could see the ghostly light of the dim grey ghost world outside. What a terrible day. I ghost shuddered and got up to walk across the ghostly floor, all covered in fog and trash amd and the corpses of insects that seep up through the tile like a stupid curse. I ran my hands all over the door to the bathroom to see if I could trip any secret wires that might activate some kind of contraption whereby a mechanical hand would emerge from the ceiling holding a silver platter and atop that a note in handwritten letters saying "you're good enough." But none of that happened. And as I entered the bathroom I turned on the light and the screaming fan howled and I looked at the mirror and saw, to my complete surprise, without any warning or previous indications, that I was a ghost.

How Today is

Watched the 2nd half of the Witch last night on netflix with my roommates.

It was fun. The movie was more interesting than scary.

Had trouble sleeping because lots of thoughts about work and how to do things.

Woke up and played around with a music app to use at after school. Mix it up. Have a little fun.

I need to run soon but don't really want to yet. I think there might be fatigue from last week and the weekend where I didn't rest very much.

Every day is a new one.

Updates from the Kingdom of Birdonia

Long ago, a great land was discovered on a cafeteria door. That land was the Land of Birdonia. And people settled that land and they built many great and wonderful things on it.

Alex and Philip and Gus joined together and built things like an infinite money pit, a droid factory, a navy, barracks for soldiers, and arrows that fling people into space when they step on them. Their alliance was very powerful and everyone thought it was pretty cool.

Mark and Derek were also aligned and they built all kinds of awesome stuff. So much stuff that it cannot all be named. Nor fit on the map. But it is very awesome nonetheless.

McKinzy and Eden also joined forces and they built a garden and had a yachtmansion that was a yacht with a mansion on top of it.

Luke and Kai were a powerful duo who had jetpacks, underground cave systems, and a top secret base underwater that was only reachable by secret entry.

Jane lived in a cabin in the woods.

Zora built a house made of pillows.

Annabelle had a mansion as well.

Davis was only aligned with Gus and he possessed a cloning tank and a factory.

Jasper was aligned with himself and he had a castle and was building an air force.

Samantha also had a castle to herself and Meg made a diving board.

Finally, Cade had a floating mansion and Henry liked to drive around in his tank.

Life was good in the Land of Birdonia. But trouble was on the horizon, soon everything would be turned upside down and great threats would befall the land. Only through working together would the great people of this land be able to save their home and all the cool stuff they made.

Some sentences about snakes and stuff

Your snakes are cold. This Sunday try using your snake basket as your laundry basket. The snakes will appreciate the warmth.

 Snakes are the most considerate creatures. They never touch things with dirty hands. This is because snakes do not possess hands. Rather, they use their muscular stomachs to conquer any terrain.

Putting a feather in one's hat is insufficient to strike fear in the heart of your opponent. Rather, shove a  handful of snakes in your mouth to make people think that you breathe snakes.

Bake off? Snake off.

Why rake the leaves when you could snake the leaves? That's where you put your snake basket underneath the pile of leaves in your yard. The neighbor kids will think twice about jumping in a pile of leaves if they are worried about potentially injuring a basket of snakes in there.

Singular: snake. Plural: snakes. Singular special: snek. Plural special: sneki.

Lovecraft Octobercraft. Herbert West: Reanimator

Last night I listened to approximately the first half of Lovecraft's story, Herbert West: Reanimator. It's kind of similar to Frankenstein except instead of working alone the narrator is a guy who is West's assistant as he goes around getting in all kinds of wacky hi-jinks trying to animate the dead.

West starts his experiments in college but falls out of favor with professors when he insists that he needs human corpses to experiment and he needs them to be fresh. I cannot overstate how many times the word fresh is used.

West and his friend sneak around and dig up bodies and try to bring them back to life with this special serum that West injects in them. And then the first one they try, they think it doesn't work but then later it probably did and now there's a zombie roaming around probably trying to kill them.

Also West reanimates this one professor who never liked his experiments and the professor became a hero after a typhoid plague struck the town but then the professor died and then he became a monster.

This story is pretty spooky but it's not really a classic psycho-mystical subconscious Lovecraft story. It's more like a gritty-grim tale of these two guys digging up dead bodies, running from the law, running from the dead bodies they dig up, waking up and getting on their grind every day. This is the working man's Lovecraft. Tom Hanks would have a role in the movie version.

I'm going to listen to the second half tonight and report back in the morning. The creepiest parts of this story are when West and the narrator feel the fear of their reanimated corpses potentially lurking. But what makes a good lovecraft story is when the turn happens, and this little trickle of weirdness and these emerging patterns finally crescendo into this enormous gaping maw of cosmic horror and chaos and evil. It's like In the Hall of the Mountain King. Go listen to that. It's like 2 minutes long. To get a sense of the increase in magnitude.

Anyway, so far this story doesn't really seem to do that. West is just a creepy guy doing creepy guy stuff.

Planning This Week's Word of the Bird

We're going to have a breaking news story. About Trucks.

We're going to have a list article. Best Ways to Use....

We're going to have a profile on someone. Someone Famous.

We're going to have a story article...like a narrative. About...Pizza Cat.

We're going to have an after school tip. Brushing Your Teeth.

We're going to have a nose review.

We're going to have a public service announcement.

Happy Spookaween

For october I wanted to do an audio book club/review of some hp lovecraft stories. I got into listening to them last year after I listened to Peter Draws read The Color Out of Space.

Tonight I'm listening to The Horror From the Middle Span. It's about this guy with a weird uncle who dies and the nephew goes to live in his house. I'll summarize it more in the morning. Update to follow.

The Horror From the Middle Span

as remembered by Andy

Ambrose Bishop goes to this skunky part of Massachusetts because his uncle Septimus Prime is believed dead. Septimus was, by all accounts, a total spooklord and a weird guy in a shop gets all creeped out when Ambrose shows up and tries to buy some stuff.

Ambrose thinks his uncle's house is pretty cool. It has a cupola. Ambrose knows that Septimus was super smart and that's probably why Septimus was mistrusted by the ignorant, idiotic locals. It's very important that we continue to repeat just how stupid everyone is around here. Anyway, Septimus's house is old and spooky and covered in mildew and books and pentagrams and stuff. Ambrose isn't sure what to make of the pentagrams because he knows that his uncle was a man of logic and science and not superstition like these disgusting yokels and bumpkins all around.

Ambrose finds a spooky cellar below the house and below that is a spooky hallway and below that is a spooky sanctum with an altar in it and there is even another trap door that leads to lower than the sanctum but Ambrose doesn't open that door.

Ambrose is like, oh man, this is weird. He goes for a walk and he sees a spooky collapsed bridge. But there's one part in the middle that is not only still standing but has been strengthened recently. It's the middle span of the bridge. At this point the reader knows that this is where the horror was/is. The general path that all Lovecraft stories of this kind tend to take is that some creepy guy, Septimus, was working on some sort of dark magic in secret and it turned him super creepy and then it gets out of control and he dies but not before freaking everybody out and going bonkers. 

We learn from some lettters that Ambrose reads that Septimus was in communication with all the other spooklords of the world, including Wilbur Weightly, who is the star of another story that I cannot remember the name of right now. Wilbur is a creep-o beep-o and his story is pretty similar to this one.

Anyway, Ambrose is slowly learning all this and getting freaked out so he keeps going down to the cellar because his horror and curiosity draw him in and then it turns out Septimus is still alive and he was probably abducting people to use for blood sacrifices and be immortal and junk.

Oh yeah, Ambrose finds some bones and he's like "oh cool, bones!". He finds the bones over by the middle span after a big flood. And he takes the bones and puts them in his spook cellar. Later he eats some lunch and then goes back to play skeleton with his bones but the bones are missing! surprise. Uncle Septimus is back now because he was either the bones or he was a thing that ate the bones to come back to life. Ambrose passes out when he sees his uncle and the uncle disappears for a while.

People from the town start to go missing and everyone is like "oh my gosh, this happened the last time Septimus Bishop was all weird and now his nephew is here and it's happening again!" And Ambrose is scared. And the townsfolk show up at his house and they burn it down and presumably the Uncle and Ambrose get sealed away in that bridge from earlier.

the end.